i3 or i5 for light games?

[Charlise]

Do I still need an i5 for light games like World of Warcraft and League of Legends? Or will an i3 perform just fine? Maybe a Pentium?

 

[Traciatim]

Things liek WOW and LOL run really well on high speed single thread CPU's, so if you were going to game only I would think either the Pentium G3258 with a decent overclock on it would be a great choice for a budget gaming machine, especially if the money savings allow you to buy a better video card.

If the choice comes down to only an i3 or i5, then for those games I would picks higher clock speed i3 over a slower clock speed i5 if the prices were similar.

 

[Charlise]

Things liek WOW and LOL run really well on high speed single thread CPU's, so if you were going to game only I would think either the Pentium G3258 with a decent overclock on it would be a great choice for a budget gaming machine, especially if the money savings allow you to buy a better video card.

If the choice comes down to only an i3 or i5, then for those games I would picks higher clock speed i3 over a slower clock speed i5 if the prices were similar.

The price of an i3 isnt the same with an i5. Hm, how about gaming while playing music from Youtube or maybe a Music Player? Can an i3 handle it without worries of slowing down unlike the Pentium? Because it has hyperthreading.

 

[2Be_or_Not2Be]

For light gaming, an i3 is fine. However, I personally would recommend getting the i5 over the i3. If you get a quad-core i5, then for games which can use more cores will then be able to do so. That is supposed to translate into better game performance.

A quad-core i5 can also help when many onscreen items (like units) are being displayed & coordinated simultaneously by the game. I'll give you an example - in playing a certain game with a friend, we had a scenario wherein 1000's of units were onscreen. Being the i3 user at the time, I received a message saying I was slowing down the game. My friend had an i5, and he never got that message. So a games' AI might benefit from have more CPU horsepower available to it.

An i5 can also stretch the life of your PC a bit farther. You might want to play a game that requires a quad-core processor. If you have a quad-core i5, then you'll be set. You might only have to worry about the graphics card, which arguably is the most important component of a gaming PC.

 

[Traciatim]

Things liek WOW and LOL run really well on high speed single thread CPU's, so if you were going to game only I would think either the Pentium G3258 with a decent overclock on it would be a great choice for a budget gaming machine, especially if the money savings allow you to buy a better video card.

If the choice comes down to only an i3 or i5, then for those games I would picks higher clock speed i3 over a slower clock speed i5 if the prices were similar.

The price of an i3 isnt the same with an i5. Hm, how about gaming while playing music from Youtube or maybe a Music Player? Can an i3 handle it without worries of slowing down unlike the Pentium? Because it has hyperthreading.

Hyperthreading doesn't help all that much. It mostly helps when you have multiple threads that access similar data, so in cases like compressing a movie using 4 threads instead of 2. If your cores are extremely busy then sharing the resources doesn't speed things up all that noticeably.

An i3 with a decent amount of RAM and a good video card is more than capable of running videos in one screen while playing a game on another though. So would a pentium though...

Plus, an i3 and i5 do get near the same price in some cases. For instance the i3-4370 and i5-4430(or 60) are only around 30 bucks apart, but for things that rely on single thread performance the i3 would be faster where things that scale across cores really well the i5 would be faster.

Plus, most of the video decompression will be done by your video card anyway, so your CPU usage when playing a video is likely going to be less than 10% anyway, no matter which you chose.

I think a better question, is that if you have to get a lesser video card in order to get a better processor because of your budget then in most cases that overall will perform worse in gaming scenarios. As an extreme example, if you take a look at this benchmark: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU/1304 you will notice that with a GTX770 the Pentium G3258 pulls off 96FPS and the i7-4690k pulls out 109FPS.

So in that example, if you only had $400 to spend on your CPU and GPU combo would it make sens to get a $320 processor and only an $80 video card... or would you balance it out more and do the i3-4130 instead which scored 104, and have a much better video card. For gaming in that situation the i3 is a far better choice because of the budget constraints.

In fact, Tom's actually has a LOL benchmark showing the difference between an i5-3550, i3-3220, and Pentium G860. You can see it here: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/league-of-legends-performance-benchmark,3484-8.html . . . the results? Within a few FPS of each other. Not even a noticeable difference.

If you look at their 1080p video comparison however, when they did the test moving up from a cheap video card like a GT630 to a mid range video card like the HD7770 quite literally tripled the frame rates . . . http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/league-of-legends-performance-benchmark,3484-6.html